Welcome to the home page of SUZANNE
MODEL, Professor Emerita in the Department
of Sociology at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst.

Although I retired in 2008, I continue to do
research on immigration. I am especially interested in why people
emigrate, the consequences of choosing one destination over another,
and why some immigrants return home. In exploring these questions, I
focus primarily on people from Taiwan and from the Caribbean. I
gather infomation by conducting personal interviews and analyzing
large data sets like censuses and surveys.

One issue to which I am currently devoting time is "the selectivity
of migration"; that is, the ways in which three sets of individuals
differ: never migrants, emigrants living abroad, and former
immigrants who have returned home. The consequences of "brain drain"
are one of the more practical implications of this
phenomenon.

In early 2010, funded by a Fulbright Grant, I
spent several months at Academia
Sinica in Taipei studying these issues.
I obtained life histories from Taiwanese who never emigrated and from
emigrants who returned to the Island from America. I also spoke with
key informants like government officials, educators and emigration
agents. In addition, with the help of Dr. Ji-Ping Lin, I obtained
access to a panel study of Taiwanese in America sponsored by the
Overseas
Compatriot Affairs Commission.

In the summer of 2010, I returned to the US and
began obtaining life histories of Taiwanese in America, an
undertaking in which I am still engaged. I am also analyzing the data
in the OCAC panel study; it explores why participants left Taiwan,
how they are adjusting to American life, and whether they are
considering a return to their homeland.

2. Destination Effects

I would like better to understand the
consequences of settling in one country versus another. To pursue
this question, I have a contract with Routledge press for a book
series: Routledge
Studies of Diasporic Peoples. Each
volume in the series will compare the integration of an immigrant
group across several destinations. At minimum, the series is
projected to include volumes that examine West Indian Blacks,
Sub-Saharan Africans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Turks, and Asian Indians.
If you are interested in contributing a volume to the series, please
contact me at model@soc.umass.edu

Thus, another project I am now working on is
authoring the first volume, The West Indian Diaspora. This
book examines the integration of immigrants from the English, Dutch
and French-speaking West Indies in the US, UK, Canada, France and the
Netherlands. The central finding is that integration does not proceed
evenly within these destinations. Some receiving countries provide
better contexts for political integration; others provide better
contexts for spatial integration. The explanations for these
differences can be found in the history and culture of these five
countries.